There’s a growing moral imperative to abolish inheritance tax – Britain’s most hated levy

It seems that everyone but the British public wants Jeremy Hunt to put off tax cuts.

The International Monetary Fund said this week that now is just not the time, and the Office for Budget Responsibility is said to be warning there is much less “fiscal headroom” available to the Chancellor ahead of next month’s Budget.

Labour, of course, would love to see a general election fought when the tax burden sits at a 70-year high and has nowhere else to go but down.

However, regardless of the economics, the Conservatives now have a moral imperative to deal with the mess that inheritance tax has become.

Labour certainly won’t be rushing to end the injustice.

We cannot forget that since David Cameron took power in 2010, inheritance tax has mutated into a charge that now looms over anyone with a family home and modest wealth.

The long-standing freeze on allowances, coupled with a house price boom and a bout of high inflation, now means that the Treasury is reaping record rates of death duties every week.

It cannot be stressed enough that this is not from the very richest who can easily side step inheritance tax with a little financial planning, but the unwitting families who never dreamed they would be considered wealthy enough to be affected.

The number of families stung by the charge has already more than doubled under the Tories and is expected to surge to roughly 50,000 a year by the end of the decade.

But now civil service probate delays are making matters worse. Probate, the legal document needed to deal with a loved one’s finances, is now taking an average of four months to obtain but in some cases executors are having to wait up to a year. Yet inheritance tax bills have to be settled within six months of death – else interest is piled on at 7.75pc. This works out at nearly £320 a week on the average bill of £214,000.

So bereaved families who cannot afford to pay such a bill upfront are being penalised through no fault of their own – because the civil service cannot get its act together and the Government can’t balance the books.

This cannot be right, and families hit by this incompetence should be spared from interest.

The very wealthiest, of course, have the cash on hand to settle these bills upfront without issue.

Again, it’s those who do not have the money who have no choice but to obtain probate to pay the bill and are now at risk of unfairly high interest rates compounding their misery.

This sorry saga is just another reason why inheritance tax should be not just cut but abolished entirely. The way it is levied and the way it is collected is no longer fair or justified. This is why inheritance tax is consistently rated Britain’s most hated tax.

Even those who have no fear of paying it despise it because it goes against the human instinct to look after your family the best you can.

Next month’s Budget is still perhaps the Conservatives’ last chance to put things right before Labour wipe the floor with them in the general election. If they can’t cut taxes, they might as well surrender now.

‘It has mutated into a charge that now looms over anyone with a family home and modest wealth’